Alex Pieterse is a licensed psychologist and an associate professor of counseling psychology in UAlbany's School of Education. His research looks at the relationship between racial discrimination and trauma, and the impact of self-awareness on the psychotherapy process.
Alex Pieterse is a licensed psychologist and an associate professor of counseling psychology in UAlbany's School of Education. His research looks at the relationship between racial discrimination and trauma, and the impact of self-awareness on the psychotherapy process.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews. This show is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Radio Public, Spotify, iHeart Radio and TuneIn.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. With me today is Alex Pieterse, an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology in UAlbany School of Education. His research looks at the relationship between racial discrimination and trauma, and the impact of self awareness on the psychotherapy process.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Alex, let's start with your involvement with Resist Racism 365. Can you share a bit about what this organization is and does?
Alex Pieterse:
Sure, and thanks for giving me the chance to talk about some of my work. Resist Racism 365 is essentially a website that I've put together with my research team, and the thinking behind using the web to highlight some of the research was really trying to translate some of our research, which typically exists in the academic domain, and try to have that more accessible to people. We think about the website as a resource for people who are interested in more academically oriented materials, clinicians, but also a way of just raising awareness about how racism and racial trauma continues to exist in our society.
Sarah O'Carroll:
That'd seem like a pretty direct fit from your research into the goals of what Resist Racism 365 is trying to do.
Alex Pieterse:
Yes. Yeah, the goal is to try to disrupt and interrupt racism, and given that I'm a scholar in one of my identities, that's the tools that we are bringing to that website, to try to inform how research can provide information that can then translate directly to people's lives, especially in the context of something like racism.
Sarah O'Carroll:
That's really neat, especially when I think of how sometimes it's so difficult to make research accessible to anyone because we're in our own communities, or it's just hard to share the research that's being done.
Alex Pieterse:
I will say one of the exciting ... I'm not media savvy, or, you know, social media, so an exciting development for me was the students have connected the website to an Instagram account. They have a blog, they will update events, or they'll have reactions to current events around race and how racism is experienced in society. It really is a way of trying to translate the academic work into a more digestible format for people who really don't live in the academy or in research.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. Now, I know that this may seem like a naive question, but what is the relationship between racial discrimination and trauma? Can you break down a bit of what you mean by that relationship?
Alex Pieterse:
Sure. The current focus on examining the link or the relationship between racism and trauma really comes out of a much larger body of literature, that shows that experiences of racism are consistently associated with either adverse mental health outcomes, physical outcomes, and so, again, this work is all correlational. It's really just saying these experiences are linked.
Alex Pieterse:
It's not causal because our models don't allow us to make that type of statement, but the research is clear, people who experience more frequent ... who report more frequent experiences of racism also report more frequent symptoms around depression and anxiety. That's where the current focus on racial trauma, kind of the context for that.
Alex Pieterse:
What's come out of that is, can we have a more specific understanding of the link or the mechanism, and because some of the symptoms that are reported, or the emotional experiences that people report as an outcome of racism, are similar to what is identified as trauma in the more psychological literature, so thinking of post traumatic stress disorder.
Alex Pieterse:
So we are not thinking about racial trauma as PTSD, but we are saying that if you look at the research, there is some overlap. People might experience intrusive thoughts, they might experience a greater sense of being vigilant because they are feeling unsafe. Those are typical experiences associated with trauma, but the literature hasn't identified racism as a type of trauma.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, what got you interested in this subject to begin with, and can you walk me through how this interest moved into doing more of a broad survey of the state of where literature is at the moment for this article?
Alex Pieterse:
Sure, that's a great question that we might need four hours for.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Sure.
Alex Pieterse:
I think, like many psychologists, it's not uncommon for us to study areas of interest that have some personal relevance. My history is that I was born in South Africa, I'm a black man, and so I was born into an experience of where race determined your life to some degree. Since coming to this country, clearly race continues to be a very powerful way in which society is structured, and so I have some personal interest in understanding how experiences of racism has kind of shaped my life, shaped the life of people I'm close to. That's probably the most direct link.
Alex Pieterse:
In teaching, it is striking to me that students feel kind of nervous and have a lot of discomfort associated with talking about race, and given that, as psychologists, what we do is encourage people to talk-
Sarah O'Carroll:
Right.
Alex Pieterse:
... we need to have a certain comfort level with talking about what is a fairly emotionally charged topic.
Alex Pieterse:
I've noticed that students, and I would say clinicians as well, will feel very authorized, feel very comfortable talking about very personal, intrusive aspects of someone's experience, but they tend to be a little more hesitant talking about race and racial experiences, which I understand in the larger context of, you know, race, still, to some degree, is a bit of a taboo subject.
Alex Pieterse:
For me, what drives me is, one of the experiences of trauma is a sense of invalidation. So something has happened to you that has in some sense invalidated your sense of self, invalidated your experience of the world as a safe place-
Sarah O'Carroll:
And even sense of agency.
Alex Pieterse:
Exactly, exactly. Clearly, a decreased sense of agency, and if you then approach a therapist, and a therapist displays some hesitance to talk about topics that are very meaningful to you, that, in and of itself, almost exacerbates your experience of invalidation. That idea, I think, led me to, in response to an invitation, led me to write on the effects of racial trauma in the context of clinical work and in the context of supervision.
Sarah O'Carroll:
What questions did you have as you embarked on this, and what answers have you been able to determine specifically, or perhaps what questions still remain?
Alex Pieterse:
Sure. Because this was looking at the state of the literature, the first question was, is the literature talking about racial trauma? In what context are they talking about racial trauma? Are there specific interventions that are being offered for racial trauma? And because this particular article is located in a special issue on trauma focused supervision, the idea was to examine how are supervisors speaking with supervisees? So these are mental health practitioners, how are they attending to racial trauma and dynamics associated with racial trauma within the literature?
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay.
Alex Pieterse:
The outcome of the review was that there's a lot of work around empirical work, racism, health outcomes, mental health outcomes. There's much less work about how to incorporate a focus on racial trauma in clinical interventions, and there's even less work talking about the type of personal work that a clinician has to do to work through their own possible racial bias, their own understanding of themselves as racial beings in our society, and how that might impact the relationship that develops, in this case with the supervisee, but also the relationship between a client and a therapist.
Sarah O'Carroll:
What would you say would be some new questions that you collected in reviewing this state of literature?
Alex Pieterse:
Okay. I think a primary question is, is the current model of trauma or traumatic stress a good enough model to incorporate or to include racial trauma? I am leaning towards that the model, the current model of PTSD, traumatic stress, et cetera, which is very much a medically oriented model, I would say is insufficient to account for or explain racial trauma. But I think that's an unanswered question, so I think that is a very big question that needs to be explored further.
Alex Pieterse:
And then some of the other questions are, how does a clinician become more comfortable, more accountable around their own experience of race, and how can they navigate discussions of race and racial trauma with supervisees in ways that feel safe, that feel nonjudgmental, non-evaluative. Those are some of the questions, both in regard to clinical work, but also training, that I think came out of some of that review.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. Now, researchers refer to three kinds of racial discrimination. What are these and how do they differ from one another?
Alex Pieterse:
Okay. That's another very big question that I'll try to be very concise with. I think the backdrop to that question is our understanding that, in society, racism occurs in different contexts, and the typical way of understanding how racism operates in society is at an individual level, so interpersonal racism, and this is where you talk about prejudice, bias racial microaggressions, et cetera.
Alex Pieterse:
The other context is institutional, so, really, structures, systems that reinforce the idea of white superiority, and then the other is cultural, where values associated with a particular racial group are deemed to be ... are more valuable than than others. That has been the kind of traditional understanding of how racism works.
Alex Pieterse:
When we are looking at racial discrimination in the context of trauma, we tend to, and I'm talking about we, this is my colleague Robert Carter and I, who are doing some of this work, we tend to differentiate racial discrimination in the sense of aversive, so where people distance themselves from others because of race.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay.
Alex Pieterse:
And then we talk about hostile, where people actually act in an aggressive way, in multiple ways. So one is distancing, and one is really being more aggressive. When we understand racism in our society, historically we've thought of the more aggressive acts, but the distancing, both individually and structurally, also, I think, carries quite an impact.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. Now, what would you say is a good description for what a race-related event is, and how about a vicarious experience of trauma?
Alex Pieterse:
Let me give you an example about a vicarious event.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay.
Alex Pieterse:
I'm going to give you an example from my life experience. I have a 16-year-old son, who is starting to be very aware and interested in issues around rights, and especially some of the really ... events that have garnered a lot of public attention, shootings, police brutality, et cetera. About two months ago, he was walking home, and said to me, "I walked past a police precinct," this is here in Albany, "walked past a police precinct and found myself feeling anxious." He said to me, "I felt my heart racing."
Alex Pieterse:
After he described that incident, he then also said to me, you know, how ironic it is that I walked past a space that is supposed to be dedicated to my safety, and I'm actually feeling unsafe. To me, that's an example of a vicarious incident of racial trauma. Again, I'm using that word very carefully, because while something did not happen to him, in the context of race, he had an experience that actually had a physiological reaction for him and an emotional reaction. He felt unsafe, he felt anxious, he felt his heart beating.
Alex Pieterse:
So if you think of racial trauma, and one aspect of racial trauma is the idea that these experiences are cumulative or ongoing, if you think of that experience occurring consistently over a period of years, even over a lifespan, you get to understand how it can have a deleterious effect, both emotionally and physically.
Alex Pieterse:
A race related event, again, can be very broad. It can go from an individual, interpersonal experience, to an experience where you are engaged in a system or an institution and you feel that you are being treated differently based on your racial group membership. Again, those incidences are sometimes more difficult to to prove as opposed to someone calling you the N word, or using a racial slur, or some negative racial epithet. Those are are very tangible, very concrete. You hear it, other people hear it, et cetera.
Alex Pieterse:
It is very broad, and I think there is, just to kind of digress a little to thinking about it clinically, I think one challenge associated with racial trauma and doing clinical work is, because racial trauma isn't necessarily accepted as a type of trauma, as opposed to sexual trauma, physical assault, et cetera, it's been my experience, both as a clinician, but also just listening and hearing other clinicians, that sometimes a client who has experienced racial trauma will try to talk about it and then feel they need to prove it in some way. They need to first convince the therapist that, what I experienced was actually a racially traumatic experience.
Alex Pieterse:
Whereas, if you come into a therapist with a experience of sexual trauma or physical assault, there's almost a greater acceptance about the validity of those experiences as trauma.
Sarah O'Carroll:
It sounds like we need to have more defined terms as racial trauma being something that is studied and accepted, and something that we can talk about in the same way that sexual trauma is.
Alex Pieterse:
Yes.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay.
Alex Pieterse:
I will give you an example from my scholarship. My colleague and I have been doing some work on a measure of racial ... or, we call it the Race-Based Traumatic Stress Symptom Scale. That's a big mouthful, but this really is a measure designed to document and quantify aspects of racial trauma, especially emotional experiences. Excuse me.
Alex Pieterse:
We've done a lot of work, you know, we think the work is quite rigorous, the measure is psychometrically sound, but we've come up against challenges getting some of the work published. Some of the challenges are, at the core, we're not sure if this is racial trauma. The way those challenges come out is, people will question the methodology, which you should, you should always question methodology, people will question the conceptual underpinning of the model, et cetera, which, again, are all valid questions.
Alex Pieterse:
But when the questions are answered and there's still a hesitance, you walk away thinking, actually, what they're doing is they're questioning the fundamental concept, an experience that is in and of itself invalidating.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Right.
Alex Pieterse:
Again, I'm not saying that just to be critical of the field. I think whenever a new idea is introduced it should be questioned, it should be challenged. But at the same time, I think there needs to be an understanding that part of the questioning of this idea is located in a larger experience of racism in our society.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Absolutely. Now, what guidance would you have for psychologists and other health professionals that are treating patients, who have themselves experienced race-based trauma, and what about the patients themselves? I know you've spoken to the need to be ... for these health professionals to be more comfortable about understanding their own experiences and so forth.
Alex Pieterse:
So your question is both in relation to clinicians, and then also people who have experienced racial trauma or race-based stress?
Sarah O'Carroll:
Yes.
Alex Pieterse:
Okay. For clinicians, I would say read, read, read, consume the literature, understand that there is now increasing evidence to really validate the relationship between racism and psychological distress, and there also is developing evidence that leaves us pretty confident that we can understand racial discrimination as a type of trauma. I would say really read, equip yourself.
Alex Pieterse:
This is going to sound almost less scientific, but I would say be courageous. Be willing to ask questions of the folk that you work with. Be willing to validate their racial experience in general as something that's real, not something that they have to prove. And if you find yourself having some difficulty, ask yourself questions. You know, what makes it easier for me to be empathic to an experience of physical assault and perhaps find myself having a more difficult time being empathic to someone who reports racial trauma?
Alex Pieterse:
It's not unlike other areas of our work. We inform ourselves with a good knowledge base, we examine our own experience as clinicians, so it's very consistent. I think there's nothing unique about racial trauma in the context of how we respond as clinicians. We do the work.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. I feel like I've been hearing some discomfort in how we need more flexible terms to define racial trauma, but at the same time, I know that this is not new research, that there has been been lots of research, which your article has built upon, to talk about this. Racial trauma is not a new idea, but perhaps we all need to be better educated about it.
Alex Pieterse:
True. This is interesting. It's not a new idea, and you almost think that it's intuitive, you know, people who have stressful life events might experience some distressing emotions, thoughts, et cetera. But I will tell you that it's only ... I think the first empirical study looking at racism and psychological outcomes was published in 1996, so this is not that long ago.
Alex Pieterse:
Even though something is intuitive and it makes sense, it's really, it's been more recently that people have really taken a kind of research lens. Clearly, there's centuries of anecdotal evidence, there's centuries of narratives associated with racial trauma, but the actual focus on it as a kind of area of scholarship is relatively new.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. Now, as a licensed psychologist yourself, how has this research informed your own clinical work?
Alex Pieterse:
It's informed it in a few different ways. For one, it's affirmed to me the reality of racial trauma, and it's also shown me how racial trauma is not unlike other traumas, the way we understand it. We understand that childhood trauma can have lifelong events. As a clinician, I will sit and hear people of color telling me stories that, to an outside ear, might sound benign, but these are stories of being overlooked, being invalidated, being called a name.
Sarah O'Carroll:
You're overlooked, or, I mean, over-surveilled or something.
Alex Pieterse:
Over-surveilled in elementary school-
Sarah O'Carroll:
Wow.
Alex Pieterse:
... where they were perhaps one or two individuals of color, and these stories stay with them. They inform choices they make later in life. I think, as a clinician, it's taught me how real and how valid the experience of racial trauma is.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, I'll be honest. In preparing for this conversation this morning, it was a fear for me of being ignorant or naive and insensitive. As someone who strives to be more aware and more empathetic and sympathetic generally, do you have any advice for me and others like me with respect to doing something about the discriminatory attitudes and behaviors that make the problem you research worse?
Alex Pieterse:
My answer to you would be the answer that I give to everybody, including myself. We need to have life experiences that broaden our ability to understand, to be empathic, to really see someone else's experience the way they see it, and it has particular relevance right now in our country where we're feeling very polarized, and part of that polarization is along race.
Alex Pieterse:
So to what extent are you willing to engage experiences that might leave you feeling uncomfortable but really expand your ability to understand, to know, to feel, to experience? And these are a range of experiences. It could be talking to someone that you don't typically talk to, inquiring about their experience. It could be reading literature that you don't usually read. Really just exposing yourself to ways in which you can experientially get in touch with the experiences of others who might be different to you.
Alex Pieterse:
Again, I think that applies to everybody, irrespective of your racial background. There needs to be some commitment and capacity to broaden our understanding, how we view the world, how we make sense, how we make judgments.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, 20 minutes of time seems even shorter than usual, but, Alex, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your research.
Alex Pieterse:
You are very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll, and that was Alex Pieterse, an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology in UAlbany School of Education. You can let us know what you thought of this episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter, @UAlbanyNews.